S. Christopher Gladwin, who founded the MusicNow online music retrieval
and sales service about 10 years ago, believes that he has developed a
better way to secure and store sensitive information. Gladwin has
developed software that divides critical data into anywhere from four to
128 "slices" that can be stored in either single or multiple data centers.
Complex algorithms are used to cut up the data, and a certain number of
slices are necessary to make the information readable again. "The data in
one location is useless, which makes the transport and storage secure,"
says Gladwin. The process is similar to packet switching over the
Internet, which transmits data in small pieces and reconstructs the
information at the other end; but instead of sending the data, it is cut up
and stored. Gladwin has made the security process available under an
open-source license through a start-up company called Cleversafe.
Cleversafe has not yet launched any products, and the release of the beta
and finished product have not been scheduled; but the company is working to
build test networks to prove the technology works. Gladwin says test grids
using as many as 300 servers have already been built and used to
successfully test the concept. The technology also could be used by banks
to ensure secure transactions or by corporate users to grant remote users
access through a secure network instead of having them store sensitive
information on laptops and portable devices.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Technology companies welcomed the signing of the America Competes Act into
law Thursday by President Bush. The new law sets aside $33.6 billion in
government funding for research in science, technology, and engineering
that industry observers believe will enable the country to maintain a
competitive advantage in these fields. The money will also be used on
education programs at universities and research institutes, and to train
teachers in math, science, technology, and foreign languages. The law also
creates the Advanced Research Projects Administration for Energy (ARPA-E)
to focus on reducing greenhouse gas and other emissions, improving energy
efficiency, and "translating scientific discoveries and cutting-edge
inventions into technological innovations." While the tech industry has
been waiting for the bill for some time, President Bush was not overly
thrilled with the legislation. "The bill creates over 30 new programs that
are mostly duplicative or counterproductive--including a new Department of
Energy agency to fund late-stage technology development more appropriately
left to the private sector--and also provides excessive authorization for
existing programs," according to a statement from the White House after
Bush signed the act.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Board games, such as checkers and chess, are already being dominated by
computer programmers, so artificial intelligence researchers are exploring
new challenges to solve. A poker playing computer program, Polaris,
designed by the same computer scientist who found the solution to checkers,
recently faced off against two professional poker players and, after 4,000
hands of poker over two days, lost by only about 30 bets. Some games are
still too complicated for computers to handle: The Japanese game Go, for
example, has a 19 by 19 grid, which presents such an enormous amount of
possible positions that computers are unable to focus. Hunter College
computer science professor Susan Epstein says studies on the best Go
players, including eye tracking, show that while there are hundreds of
possible good moves, the best human players focus on only three of four--a
difficult skill for a computer to master. Michael Genesereth, director of
the Logic Group at Stanford University, suggests that it may be possible to
teach computers to see games such as Go as humans do by no longer relying
on programs that simply map out a single game. He researches general
gaming that teaches computers to identify and study patterns and principles
used in a variety of puzzles. At the same conference Polaris played the
humans, Genesereth held a machine-on-machine championship that had general
gaming programs face off against one another in several boar game mash-ups;
the Air Force Research Laboratory in Rome, N.Y., is researching similar
computing models by having two computers play asynchronous chess, which is
where the two players do not have to wait turns but can move any piece at
any time. Genesereth says these code-against-code matches are harder to
program but are significantly easier to translate to real-life
situations.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Sandia National Laboratories has launched its Cognitive Science and
Technology Program (CS&T), which may lead to advancements such as virtual
representations of people that are modeled after how they actually think
and their level of knowledge, or computers in cars that appreciate good
driving skills and that know and are able to compensate for the driver's
limitations. Chris Forsythe, a member of the lab's cognition research
team, says the lab's research will not lead to better guns or tools for
national security but will create a revolution of the mind that effects how
people think and how machines can help people work better. A major focus
of Sandia's research is studying how individuals interact with others and
with machines, including using machines to help humans perform more
efficiently and installing cognitive methods into machines so humans and
machines can capitalize on each other's strengths while compensating for
each others weaknesses. Russ Skocypec, senior manager of Sandia's Human,
Systems, and Simulation Technologies Department, says cognitive systems
technologies could have numerous positive impacts on national security.
Skocypec believes that major influences effect the outcomes of every war
and that the world is engaged in a human war that is influenced by
individual people instead of technology or bureaucracy, which makes it
important for Sandia, a national security laboratory, to develop a better
understanding of the mind and to use machines to recognize patterns, deal
with massive amounts of data, solve difficult problems, and perform
complicated activities.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

The Green Grid has unveiled a road map for reducing power consumption in
data centers that includes an agenda for "deliverables" on identifying and
setting standards, metrics, and best practices for improving energy
efficiency. According to John Tuccillo, a vice president at American Power
Conversion and a board member of the Green Grid, the kind of system in data
centers, such as high-performance, enterprise, or Web 2.0 applications,
could determine the standards, metrics, and best practices. Mark Monroe,
director of sustainable computing at Sun Microsystems and another board
member, says the group wants to offer tools and guidelines that will allow
organizations to measure and compare energy efficiency to standards and
baselines, as well as best practices for improving data centers. A week
ago, a report from the EPA revealed that power consumption in data centers
more than doubled from 2000 to 2005, and will do so again by 2011. Energy
efficiency programs will be needed or power consumption could cost the
private and government sectors $7.4 billion annually, according to the EPA,
which adds that current technologies and design strategies could rein it in
by 25 percent a year. Uptime Institute executive director Ken Brill says
energy could be saved by moving data from tens of thousands of "comatose"
servers to "less power-intensive storage."Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will be the home of the
world's fastest supercomputer in the next few years. The National Science
Foundation has approved funding to purchase the Blue Waters system, which
would be capable of performing arithmetic calculations at a petaflop per
second, or 1,000 trillion operations per second. Blue Waters, which is
slated to be up and running in 2011, would be about 500 times faster than
most supercomputers today. "Working at the frontiers of knowledge is
increasing the demand for powerful cyberinfrastructures," said NSF deputy
director Kathy Olsen in a statement. Blue Waters would provide U.S.
scientists and engineers "access to unprecedented petascale computing
resources that will allow them to ask and answer complex questions we
haven't even dreamed of," she explained. NSF would not disclose whether
IBM has been chosen to build the petascale computer, which would cost $208
million over four and a half years. A smaller supercomputer will be
located at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville Joint Institute for
Computational Science. The NSF has approved $65 million over five years
for the system, which will top off just under 1 petaflop and have nearly
four times the capacity of the Teragrid.Click Here to View Full Article
- Web Link May Require Free Registration
to the top

Major search engines like Google and Yahoo, as well as small search
specialists like those that cater to business customers, are racing to
develop next-generation technologies that will be better and more precise
at providing search results that more closely match the information for
which the user was searching. Microsoft says people currently spend an
average of 11 minutes before finding what they are looking for--which also
leads to half of all potential online sales being lost, according to
Gartner. With next-generation search engines, Web users will no longer
have to simplify their queries; rather, they will be able to ask
full-length questions and receive precise and relevant results.
Linguistics, the science of language, is widely being deployed to help
search engines understand the question, rather than simply matching
keywords. These semantic search engines examine language much like an
English student, using dictionaries and thesauri to understand meaning,
syntax, and sentence structure. Currently, humans are needed to help apply
language rules and define categories to narrow searches. Another search
engine tool being developed is a queryless search, which runs a search
based on previous queries or using the context in a Word document or Excel
spreadsheet. Apple's iTunes program currently runs a similar feature by
displaying related music at the iTunes store when a listener plays a track.
The queryless search, also known as serendipity, is the hardest feature
for a search, being computationally intensive and having a
difficult-to-design interface, according to IDC analyst Susan Feldman; but
companies are making progress. Search engine companies are also working on
developing search engines that are better at tracking a user's habits to
provide more personalized results, as well as creating a more social aspect
to search engines with features like social bookmarking, tagging, and
shared searchers that provide better results as more people use them. The
next generation of search engines will also provide a universal search and
search all media, images, audio, video, and text without relying on
metadata to find non-text results.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Researchers at IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, and undoubtedly
other companies are exploring technologies that might lead to data centers
that require no cooling equipment, which would lower power usage
dramatically. Some companies are already developing components that
require no cooling, with Sun Microsystems possibly being the closest to
creating a self-sustained data center that requires no outside cooling.
"We've already got a version of this self-contained data center in our
Blackbox," says Sun vice president and engineer Subodh Bapat. "All you need
is a concrete floor, a chilled water source and a power draw, and you have
a portable data center that can be dropped in just about anywhere." Sun's
Project Blackbox combines storage, computing, network infrastructure
hardware and software with high-efficiency power and liquid cooling, all
contained in modular units based on standard 20-by-8-by-8-foot shipping
containers. Each Blackbox contains 250 Sun Fire blade servers, provides up
to 1.5 petabytes of disk storage. features 2 petabytes of tape storage and
7 TB of RAM, and requires no air cooling. Bapat says significant progress
on no-cooling-needed data centers will be made over the next few years.
"We're already on that track now, and we're only going to continue to
discover more ways to improve systems--through lower-power processors,
better design, and other components," according to Bapat. HP senior vice
president for technology services Mike Rigodanzo emphasizes that HP is a
leader in designing better-tuned data centers, which are designed to
optimize airflow and air conditioning-unit locations. Rigodanzo explains
that large data centers are not homogeneous and that each one has airflow
and design challenges, so they need to be designed correctly by special
services. Bapat says software that monitors power draw across a data
center and calibrates it with the workload on a dynamic basis will soon be
available and will be a major power saver. "It's not hard to imagine that
we'll eventually get to full data centers that won't need cooling
equipment. These will be hundreds of times more efficient. And what a
savings in power draw that will be," says IBM vice president of global
sites and facilities Steve Sams. "Some day we'll look back and see that we
could have improved a lot of things far earlier than we actually did."Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) officials in the
agency's Strategic Technology Office have established the Scalable Network
Monitoring program to develop sustainable network defenses and monitoring
strategies. A statement from DARPA says the agency is looking to develop
new ways to monitor and safeguard the military's growing computer networks.
The planned size of the Global Information Grid and the use of the new
Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) on Department of Defense networks create
"new challenges" to information assurance, according to DARPA. As military
networks continue to expand, the shrinking size and "signature" of threats
makes them harder to detect. "As a result, many conventional approaches to
defending our networks will not be sustainable," the statement says. The
Scalable Network Monitoring program will develop network monitoring
approaches that can be applied to any network, regardless of size. The
approaches will be particularly useful in the near future as the Department
of Defense plans to start using IPv6 for unclassified parts of its networks
in the summer of 2008. Kris Strance, a senior information technology
analyst in the office of the DOD's chief information officer, says some
aspects of IPv6 present new types of security risks, such as
vulnerabilities in the formation of ad-hoc networks on the battlefield and
the use of IPv6 networks for mobile communications.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Researchers in Taiwan have developed a computer screen that automatically
adjusts to the location of the user so the clearest possible image is
always viewed. The prototype liquid crystal display makes use of software
that can calculate the amount of light needed to pass through liquid
crystals to prevent images from appearing blurred or distorted when the
user looks at the screen from an angle. A miniature camera has been
connected to the prototype display to track the position of the user. The
color and clarity of images often suffer for people who use handheld
devices, including digital cameras, considering users do not always look at
their screens from straight on. "In some applications, the degraded image
caused by viewing angle may compromise the judgment made by the viewer,"
says Wayne Cheng, who teamed up with colleague Chih-Nan Wu at the Photonics
and Display Institute at the National Chiao Tung University, to develop the
screen. Trial results have been promising, and Cheng and Wu now plan to
use an infrared sensor as the tracking application, which would be more
feasible for handheld devices.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

DARPA's 13 Future Icon projects are the types of projects that could have
impacts beyond their original plan and drive the development of
technologies used elsewhere in the government and in industry. "They are
tremendously difficult technical challenges that will be hard to solve
without fundamentally new approaches - ones which may require bringing
multiple disciplines to bear and perhaps even entirely new disciplines,"
says DARPA director Tony Tether. The Programmable Matter project focuses
on developing software that would allow physical objects to change their
size, shape, color, and other attributes as needed to fulfill unique
functions in, for example, a military communications system. This project
could lead to inventions like a malleable antenna that could change its
shape depending on the radio or radar it is connected to, says Tether.
"The challenge is to build a solid object out of intelligent parts that
could be programmed so that it can transform itself into other physical
objects in three dimensions," explains Tether. The Counter-Underground
Facilities program is striving to develop sensors, software, and related
technology that could pinpoint power, water, and airflow from cave
installations, evaluate the condition of underground facilities before and
after attacks, and monitor activities within cave structures during
attacks. Another project is the Chip Scale Atomic Clocks (CSAC) project,
which would provide solutions to immediate concerns in defense networks and
in helping soldiers detect enemy vehicles and facilities. The CSAC project
would also provide continual synchronization of systems linked to the
Global Information Grid, and deploy tiny clocks in hundreds of systems,
such as radios, radars, sensors, and location units using GPS.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

The Web sites used in the 2000 election to swap votes so voters in swing
states who wanted to support the third-party candidate could swap votes
with a voter in a safe state who wanted to vote for a major-party candidate
have been deemed legal and protected by the First Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution by a federal appeals court in California. The purpose of the
swap sites, VoteSwap2000.com and VoteExchange2000.com, was to improve
Gore's chances of winning the Electoral College without reducing Green
Party candidate Ralph Nader's share of the national popular vote, but the
site's creators shut down the sites after then-California Secretary of
State Bill Jones threatened to criminally prosecute VoteSwap2000.com's
owner, Alan Porter, for allegedly violating various provisions of the
California election and penal codes, including selling votes for money.
Porter and VoteExchange2000.com's owner, William Cody, shut down the Web
sites and filled a lawsuit in federal court claiming that Jones' action of
threatening prosecution violated the First Amendment and exceeded his
authority under California's election code. The court found that Secretary
Jones did exceed his authority and that attempting to stop vote trading,
which the court also ruled is not the same as bribing people to vote a
certain way, is protected by the First Amendment.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Technology has never been more prevalent in children's lives, but formal
education in how to create, develop, and use the tools of technology is
incredibly insufficient, according to Glennetta Krause, lead teacher at the
Hughes Center Teach & Technology program. A growing effort to get children
excited and interested in technology includes programs like summer camps at
universities for potential engineers and scientists, and open-access
computer labs and weekend workshops hosted by nonprofits. The Hughes
Center has incorporated computer technology training as a critical aspect
of preparing the next generation of classroom teachers. Krause said the
Hughes Center is one of the only programs in which students have a
technology class every day. Julie Burdick, the director of pre-admissions
for the College of Engineering at the University of Cincinnati, says
college campuses are generally the best place to find programs for children
interested in computer science and engineering, and that post-secondary
education options are also a good option during the school year.
Non-profit organizations like Media Bridges can provide on opportunity to
learn practical computer applications as well. Media Bridges teaches free
classes for eight to 12 year olds and 13-to-18 year olds during the summer
and on Saturdays, teaching children how to use a camera, write a script,
digitally edit video, burn video onto a DVD, upload video to the Web, and
to design a Web site. Media Bridges education director Sara Mahle says
that their program is basically the only way for a lot of the participating
kids to learn and experience such technology.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Initiatives to encourage Semantic Web technology adoption seek to supply a
connected data backbone, which has led to an explosion of RDF information
sources that has in turn given rise to massive numbers of URIs for
non-information resources. This feeds into the problem of coreference,
whereby the same entity is described by different URIs. The Consistent
Reference Service (CRS) is a tool for managing coreference between the
millions of URIs building up on the Semantic Web, and the service has been
deployed as an RDF knowledge base as well as a relational database with RDF
export. The CRS defines a "bundle" as a group of resources that refer to
the same concept within a given context, and different bundles may be
employed to cluster URIs of the same resource in different contexts. The
authors offer the Resilience Knowledge Base Explorer as a Semantic Web
application capable of presenting a unified view of a substantial volume of
heterogeneous data sources in reference to a given domain, and they have
devised an underlying information infrastructure that uses the CRS
architecture. "Our future plan is to distribute all our knowledge bases
such that the ownership is delegated to a third party, together with an
accompanying CRS or several CRSs," the authors conclude. "The next stage
of research will then highlight exactly what issues need to be resolved
when linking and reasoning about such a highly distributed system."Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

A convergence of biomechanics, computer science, neuroscience,
mathematics, nanotechnology, materials science, tissue engineering, and
robotics is expected to yield technologies that will enhance our bodies far
beyond more efficient and natural prosthetics for the disabled. For
instance, North Carolina pain-relief surgeon Dr. Stuart Meloy discovered
quite by accident that orgasms could be triggered by stimulating nerves via
electrodes placed parallel to the spine. Other notable innovations include
new prosthetic legs that offer more natural movement; "bionic" limbs that
operate through the relocation of nerve endings; cochlear implants that
directly interface with nerves in the brain to restore hearing; and deep
brain stimulation (DBS) implants that blot out defective neural signals
that inhibit and distort normal bodily functions by continually sending
electrical current into specific regions of the brain. A next-generation
DBS device is under development that promises to send current into the
brain only when needed. Also making waves is the BrainGate, a
brain-machine interface that allows users to control a computer by thought
via a microchip implanted in the motor cortex. Even more ambitious goals
include direct brain-to-brain transmission of thoughts and impulses,
Internet-linked implants, and the augmentation of our senses through
technology within the body. There are many ethical concerns revolving
around smart robotic prostheses, and Georgia Institute of Technology
professor Henrik Christensen says the solution is to split accountability
between the user and the technology producer. A similar issue surrounds
the eligibility of athletes with prosthetics in sporting events, based on
concerns that they may have an unfair advantage.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Online virtual worlds can be useful research tools for behavioral, social,
and economic science, along with human-oriented computer science, writes
William Sims Bainbridge of the National Science Foundation's Division of
Information and Intelligent Systems. Popular worlds such as Second Life
(SL) and World of Warcraft (WoW) are accessed through personal computers
running special software that links to one or more servers that pass data
back and forth between users over the Net, and these simulations involve
three-dimensional spaces inhabited by manipulable objects, currency, and
sometimes interactive artificial intelligence characters. SL is
particularly amenable to formal experiments in social psychology or
cognitive science because it can support a virtual facility and enlist
research subjects like an actual laboratory, while WoW may be more suitable
to nonintrusive statistical research into social networks and economic
systems by virtue of its ability to produce a huge volume of information on
social and economic transactions. Virtual worlds are a prime environment
for creating online laboratories that can automatically recruit vast
numbers of research subjects inexpensively, an important factor in
experiments designed to explore the dynamics of complex causal systems.
Online game makers might welcome such experimentation as an opportunity to
make game play more interesting for subscribers. There is an ethical angle
to consider in such research, given that it involves human subjects. "It
is especially important to study virtual worlds now, because the current
period of transformation may not last much longer, and because it may be
impossible to reconstruct its key processes and phenomena entirely from
historical records that are naturally preserved," says Bainbridge.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top